The latest selections, scheduled to be online by the fall of 2019, include some Hartford-based publications; they’re listed below according to category, with their years of publication. The complete list is here.

“Grating the Nutmeg,” the podcast co-produced by State Historian Walt Woodward and “Connecticut Explored” magazine, continues to deliver the goods, proving itself as essential listening for anyone interested in Hartford history and Connecticut history in general.

Hartford’s one-time prominence as a publishing center comes up in this episode, in which Woodward and co-host Brenda Miller of the Hartford History Center at the Hartford Public Library interview Keith Staveley and Kathleen Fitzgerald about their book, “United Tastes: The Making of the First American Cookbook.” The title refers to “American Cookery,” first published in Hartford in 1796 and commonly regarded as the first cookbook published in the United States. The identity of the author remains a mystery; the name on the title page–Amelia Simmons–turns up in no other records from the period. There’s no mystery, however, about the publisher. The partnership of George Goodwin and Barzillai Hudson were already publishing the Connecticut Courant (today’s Hartford Courant) and couldn’t keep up with the demand for another title of theirs, Noah Webster’s spelling and grammar book, widely known as the “Blue-Backed Speller.” As Woodward notes in the podcast, the cookbook appeared to fit into Hudson & Goodwin’s effort in those years, just after the Revolution, to promote “Americanism.”

Though titled “The Challenge of Fair Housing in Connecticut’s Suburbs,” the podcast episode deals in several respects with Hartford. For instance, when the federal government sought to revive the home mortgage market as an antidote to the Great Depression in the 1930s, it partnered with lenders to create maps that would highlight some neighborhoods as better-than-expected risks for mortgages. But the maps also showed the poorer risks–based not just on the prospects of repayment, but on such social criteria as the percentage of foreign-born or African-American families. As a result, these so-called poor-risk neighborhoods (color-coded as red on the maps, hence “redlining”) became still less attractive to lenders, which in turn made them poorer. Dougherty notes that in Hartford’s case, the neighborhoods red-lined in the ’30s tended to lie along the Connecticut River, then known as the East Side.

Then there’s the discriminatory obstacles that Jewish families in the city’s North End faced in trying to move to West Hartford and other suburbs following World War II — a story that would be all too familiar to other racial and ethnic groups that initially settled in Hartford.

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Still another Grating episode spotlights Steve Thornton’s new book, “Wicked Hartford.” Rather than the vice and tabloid scandal implied by the title, Thornton’s work focuses on the struggles of Hartford’s 99 percent. “I wanted to talk about the unsung heroines and the overrated heels,” Thornton tells CT Explored Assistant Publisher Mary Donohue in the podcast. “I wanted to talk about people who were enslaved and people who were entitled. I wanted to make that contrast, because history is usually written for and by the ‘great’ white men of our past.” Among Thornton’s heels is Hartford’s most revered industrialist, gun maker Samuel Colt, who is called out for selling weapons to the South as well as the North in the lead-up to the Civil War — something widely known at the time but largely ignored now. “It’s really amazing that we’re willing to overlook that,” Thornton says.

The book also brings to light, among other things, the city’s Seyms Street jail, which became so notorious for its deplorable conditions that it drew national attention; the plight of “newsies” and other child laborers; and the struggles city residents faced during the Great Depression.

In light of David Rosado becoming Hartford’s new police chief, it seemed appropriate to track down and publish a list of previous chiefs. It wasn’t as easy as expected; the list below comes mostly from from an archived page of the Police Department’s old website.

As for Rosado, he’s new to the Department but hardly new to Hartford. He grew up in the old Charter Oak Terrace housing projects and graduated from Bulkeley High School, returning there last week for a swearing-in ceremony meant to send a message to city kids. “Bulkeley means something to me; that’s where I grew up,” Rosado told the Hartford Courant. “There’s significance to that; it sends a message to kids there that ‘You too can accomplish something if you set your mind to it.'”

After graduating from the University of Connecticut, where he also obtained a law degree, Rosado rose through the ranks of the Connecticut State Police, including stints leading Troop H in Hartford, Troop W in Windsor Locks, and the internal affairs unit. He was a a lieutenant colonel, with more than two decades of service, when he left the state police to take the Hartford post.

In a January 23 news release from City Hall, City Councilman Thomas “TJ” Clarke II referred to Rosado as the city’s first Latino police chief.

This list dates back to 1901, though the Police Department was formally created in 1860. Anyone with material on the Department’s history is welcome to send it to kevin@hartfordhistory.net or P.O. Box 370202, West Hartford, CT 06137-0208.

It’s easy to paint the second half of the 20th Century as a time of decline for Hartford and most other American cities, but let’s remember the work of environmentalists who succeeded back then in forcing a clean-up of our rivers—a vital precursor to all the waterfront revivals we see now, including Hartford’s. Without laws like the federal Clean Water Act of 1972, there probably would be no Riverfront Plaza today. After all, who’d want to hang out by a stinky, polluted Connecticut River?

One of those instrumental in writing and securing passage of the Clean Water Act was David Zwick, who died on Feb. 5 in Minneapolis, at age 75. The New York Times has published an inspiring obituary of him, including quotes from activist Ralph Nader, who recalled recruiting the young Vietnam-veteran-turned-law-student for “Nader’s Raiders.” In 1971 Zwick and Marcy Benstock wrote “Water Wasteland,” a lengthy report that detailed the nation’s failures up to that point in trying to control water pollution. He then went to work on drafting the Clean Water Act, helping to make it bulletproof from opponents’ attempts to undermine it.

The Times noted that when it came time to commemorate the Act’s 25th anniversary in 1987, then-Environmental Protection Secretary Carol M. Browner remarked: “By any measure, this landmark legislation has been hugely successful. Once-dead rivers, lakes, and estuaries are now pulsating with life. People are returning to them — to swim, to fish, to ply the waters in their boats and to relax on their shores.”

The work of connecting people to the Hartford and East Hartford riverfront is continued today by Riverfront Recapture, founded in 1980.

It’s nice to see progress in the plans to rehabilitate the long-vacant office buildings at the corner of Pearl and Trumbull streets.

The Hartford Business Journal reports that a New York-based partnership has secured $12.6 million in financing to convert the 12-story building at 101 Pearl Street in 157 market-rate apartments. The partnership also intends to convert neighboring seven-story building at 111 Pearl Street into 101 apartments.

Those of us who frequented downtown watering holes in the early 1980s best remember 111 Pearl as the home of Sean Patrick’s, a basement-level bar; you could look down into it through street-level windows on the Trumbull Street side.

The building was to have been torn down in the early 1990s to make way for one of several downtown skyscraper projects that, thanks to an epic real-estate collapse, came to nothing. The 101 Pearl site would have become the Cutter Financial Center, planned as the tallest building in New England. The project never made it to the demolition stage (developer Anthony F. Cutaia ran out of money and eventually ended up in prison for running a Ponzi scheme in South Florida), but the other sites weren’t so fortunate. For more on those debacles, read “What Hartford Was Supposed to Be,” an article on the Connecticut Historical Society’s website.

Where is this building located? The symbol affixed to the top is a big clue. For the answer, along with previous questions and answers, go to the Trivia Questions page of HartfordHistory.net. And please: no wagering.